The Arts and Humanities Data Service (http://ahds.ac.uk) was established in 1986 by the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils in the UK. Since its foundation it has established distributed digital services and collections for archaeology, history, literary and linguistic texts (the Oxford Text Archive), performing arts, and visual arts.

This paper will present the development and implementation of the AHDS Gateway to online catalogues launched in Autumn 1998 and will consider the implications of convergence between libraries, archives and museums building digital collections and the potential of systems using Dublin Core and Z39.50 to support cross-sectoral, multi-disciplinary searching of distributed digital collections.